


The Five Stages of Grief (or, how to deal with the totally preventable death of the love of your life)

by t-hy-lla (rivenjolras)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, Pining, Star Trek: Into Darkness, how to lose your medical license in 80 days or less: The Leonard McCoy story, poor coping skills, rated for Naughty Words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-11-29 07:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11436459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivenjolras/pseuds/t-hy-lla
Summary: Leonard McCoy gets very well acquainted with the 5 stages of grief after Jim just up and dies on him, like a fucking asshole.





	The Five Stages of Grief (or, how to deal with the totally preventable death of the love of your life)

Doctor Leonard Horatio McCoy isn’t qualified to be a psychologist, persay, but he knows a few things from the mandatory psychology courses for his well-rounded fancy degree. Starfleet thought that since they’re sticking a bunch of people and aliens on one flying tin can, maybe the resident Doctor should know a little bit about therapy. If Starfleet personnel need services he’s not qualified to offer, well… they have specialists for that. They lose enough people that they have several full-time grief specialists in their employ. Mainly for civilian family of fallen personnel, but the odd best-friend-of-the-late-gamma-shift-engineer shows up every now and again.

Yes, Leonard McCoy, M.D., knows a little bit about the five stages.

/

The first stage of grief and loss is Denial.

When James T. Kirk dies behind glass, his primary physician McCoy has his hands in some ensign’s abdomen. In the chaos, he barely hears Scotty race in, screaming that the Captain is dead- and Christine telling him that _Doctor McCoy is operating_ \- and _you can’t go in there_ \- followed by the _no, you don’t understand!_ \--

He doesn’t stop until he’s sure that the ensign is lost. He pulls his soiled gloves off calmly, and wipes his brow with the back of his arm. What was that about the Captain being dead? No, it must be some other Captain. The Enterprise can’t lose her captain, because that would mean that Jim is gone.

Montgomery Scott finally approaches him- or Christine finally lets him- to tell him the news of the other Captain. The dead Captain of some other ship in some universe other than this one. As he’s explaining that _he saved everyone, he insisted, he’s a hero_ \- someone brings in the black body bag.

Doctor Leonard McCoy is handed a PADD to sign by his head nurse. _James Tiberius Kirk, Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise of Starfleet, has passed in the line of duty_ \- No. 

If James Tiberius Kirk is dead, then that means _Jim_ is dead.

He doesn’t sign it.

 

/

The second stage is Anger.

Leonard knows a little bit about that. One could say that him and this stage are intimately acquainted.

He puts Jim’s body on ice, less out of actual belief that Khan’s blood can cheat death itself, but more out of a furious thought like ‘I don’t have time for this, Jim’ and ‘of course you would die when I have patients lined up at the door, that’s just fucking like _you_ ’. He tables the whole damn problem, because dealing with that shit immediately is better than Jim deserves, and Jim will never learn his lesson that way.

He checks pulses by hand and stitches a thousand stitches and re-sets bones with rage thrumming in the back of his head. He leaves rage with the coat-check in his brain, makes it future Leonard’s issue. Just like Jim and his stupid habit of fucking dying. Except, no, this time it’s past tense. Jim just had to go and die.

This stage makes it until the he goes to comm him after shift out of habit, and gets met with silence. 

Jim doesn’t need a comm in the freezer, after all.

/

The next stage is Bargaining.

Jim has been dead 48 days.

That damn tribble is still alive, and Sulu gave it to his daughter for “safekeeping”. But Jim is much bigger than a tribble, and remarkably more complex. Leonard is afraid that Jim will decompose too much to be “saved”- that is, if this crazy plan would even work- if he tries to inject him and monitor him a few more times. Winona has been patient with Leonard (and his team), but she wants a funeral. That means surrendering Jim. No, not Jim- if he does that, then Jim is truly gone and all he’d be giving her is a body.

Leonard has been working day and night with a single-minded determination that is terrifying to onlookers. He would move heaven and earth for Jim. Spock has looked the other way, for the most part; Leonard expects that he would be lecturing him on “decreased efficiency in humans when faced with extreme fatigue” if his patient were literally anyone else.

Previous generations of McCoys were the praying type. Leonard isn’t. If he believed in God, he wouldn’t be doing this. He wouldn’t be trying to pluck Jim and his angel wings right out of the sky and tie him down to condemn him to a hundred odd years of human suffering. If he believed in God, he would be begging him for one more chance. Hell, he’d gladly go south to the devil himself if he thought it’d work. Eternal damnation, an earthly existence without Jim, ...what’s the difference?

/

Depression- the stage most people know about.

Leonard doesn’t drink. If he drinks, he’ll know that he’s truly given up.

Unfortunately, drinking is his best “coping skill”.

He can’t stand it. The pitying looks. How everyone else seems to have already moved on, as if Jim being dead is a sure thing. They all talk in the past tense. Kirk was a hero. His senior staff all politely pretend they don’t notice Leonard’s insistence on using “is”.

Jim _is_ dethawing for the next (last) serum attempt . Jim _is_ beautiful, even with his skin waxy and damaged from radiation. Jim’s hand _is_ stiff when Leonard touches it. Jim _is_ silent when the serum in injected.

Leonard stands vigil over him, waiting for Jim’s fingers to warm and curl into his.

But they don’t.

/

Acceptance is a bullshit stage, Leonard decides. 

He never accepted it. If he had, he wouldn’t currently be watching the slow rise and fall of Jim’s chest in the hospital bed. He’s technically not supposed to be on Starfleet property, due to the active investigation and suspension of his medical license and all. Watching Jim, he barely cares. He’s breathing, like a champion. He’s won the World Olympics of breathing on his own, and Leonard’s going to give him a shiny gold medal.

In spite of this, Boyce and Starfleet Medical and so-called “experts” have deemed his prognosis officially as “poor”. Jim has been breathing, but there has been no brain activity for weeks. There’s no telling if key brain cells are too damaged (rotted, radiated, take your pick) to ever regenerate, strange voodoo magic superblood or no.

He talks at Jim, mostly complains, while Spock sits by the bed with a PADD doing ‘acting Captain’ related paperwork. They both agree not to kick the other out, so they’ll both be there if and when Jim wakes. Spock never turns Leonard in, which is frankly quite rebellious for the Vulcan, and that’s how he knows that they’re going to be friends ‘til he’s in the grave himself.

The others visit too, if sporadically. They’re still hesitant- 3 months is a long time for a person to be pseudo-dead. The first time Chekov sees their Captain’s chest moving, he chokes and his hands fly to his mouth. Leonard pulls him into a hug, because he’s been there, done that already. He can be the rock, today at least. 

When Jim’s fingers twitch, Spock is getting Leonard a coffee. He makes sure to be closest to the bed, the first thing Jim sees when those baby blues finally crack open. 

He pretends he wasn’t staring when it finally happens.

“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic.” He quips, tricorder he’s definitely _not_ supposed to be using in hand, “You were barely dead.”

When Jim finally smiles, Leonard forgets all about those stages.

**Author's Note:**

> wrote & edited in one night because the writing bug bit me. inspired by a fanart on pintrest of Bones crying and quoting the line "Don't destroy the one called Kirk" (a line from a TOS episode). 
> 
> come yell at me on tumblr, t-hy-lla, make me not write these terrible things


End file.
